Massie Has Self, Not Trump, to Blame

Since the conservative press these days largely cheer-leads whatever the hell Trump wants -- whenever it isn't explaining how his latest whims are actually 3-D chess -- it behooves one to consider other sources on just about any matter.

And by "other sources," I don't mean just legacy media, which is largely leftist, shallow, and prone to jump to banal conclusions. Case in point: Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, who "lost to Trump" in his primary yesterday.

Lost to Trump? Really?

I am glad to have encountered Sean Davis's analysis of that defeat, in part because it was good to see that there is at least one other person who remembers that Massie took on Trump before and lived electorally to tell about it:

Trump mercilessly trashed Massie in 2020 -- calling him a "disaster" for America and Kentucky and saying he should be thrown out of the GOP entirely -- but Massie easily swatted that away and won 81-19, so you can't say he only lost because of Trump. He went toe-to-toe with Trump on COVID in 2020 and won overwhelmingly.

Massie lost because he went from being perceived as a quirky but lovable nerd who seemed to genuinely believe everything he said, to looking like a clout-chasing influencer who cared more about getting TV time with Democrats on an issue he clearly never cared about until five minutes ago than he did about representing his voters.

I will not pretend to know enough to weigh in on this theory, but it certainly sounds plausible. More importantly, it directly rebuts the notion, ridiculous when both parties are infested with lunatics, that Trump is somehow an electoral juggernaut whose slightest displeasure can sink a political career.

See also John Sununu's 2024 editorial, "Donald Trump Is a Loser," which goes into some detail on how a Trump-led Republican party fared in past elections. While Sununu wrongly predicted a loss in 2024, I'd chalk that up to Biden's failure as President and the poor choice of Kamala Harris as a replacement -- combined with an electorate that had largely forgotten how awful Trump was, or hadn't paid enough attention in the first place to realize that the first time.

I have no predictions for the next election, but consider this: The Republicans know their polling stinks and appear to hope to gerrymander themselves out of trouble.

-- CAV

Pardoned Insurrectionist Update

Just as news breaks of President Trump stealing $1.776 billion of our money to create a slush fund for the January 6 insurrectionists, we get a reminder of the kind of person Trump deems worthy of such largess:

[Ryan] Nichols was among the more prominent Trump supporters arrested in the wake of the riot, having live-streamed the chaos while calling out threats to politicians.

"I'm telling you if Pence caved, we're gonna drag motherf-----s through the streets. You f-----g politicians are going to get f-----g drug through the streets," he said in the livestream.

This upstanding citizen hasn't changed a bit since our "law and order" President dispensed with the need for any kind of "revolving door justice system:"

Harrison County Sheriff B.J. Fletcher told a local news station in East Texas this week that Nichols had followed a man out of church to the parking lot, where he proceeded to lift his shirt and flash a gun.

...

Fletcher said a bystander stepped in and de-escalated the confrontation, but that Nichols had done "more than enough" to be charged with deadly conduct.

Nichols is the fifth insurrectionist to have reoffended since the pardons.

No word yet on whether Trump will make him the second such person to be re-pardoned.

-- CAV

Dishonest Don

At The Hill, former New York state prosecutor Scott Bolden resurrects a term from the Vietnam Era: the credibility gap.

Back then, the term came into use when Lyndon Johnson's lying about the Vietnam War caused the public to stop believing him. Bolden outlines his open-and-shut case as seen in part below, with plenty of links to help anyone who hasn't been paying attention:

... Today, a credibility gap plagues President Trump because of his whoppers about the war with Iran and much more.

Trump's credibility gap endangers our national security. His hyperbolic rants are so absurd -- and his policy flip-flops so extreme -- that our foreign allies and adversaries don't believe much of what he says and no longer take him seriously. It's as if the proverbial boy who cried wolf moved into the Oval Office.

Trump has alienated our allies with his lies, insults, temper tantrums, tariffs, aid cuts to Ukraine and other nations, and threats to withdraw from NATO and annex Canada and Greenland. Our adversaries don't fear his threats because he often fails to carry them out. This has generated the insult of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).[links omitted, bold added]

And later:

Trump's lies and frequent policy changes have made it hard for business executives and farmers to plan for the future. For example, Trump's tariffs have raised costs for U.S. factories, retailers and farms that import finished products, parts and raw materials, and "have done significant damage to the economy" and slowed job growth, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics. [link removed, bold added]

I recommend reading the whole thing.

In addition to providing links in the original of the above, Bolden reports both a few of the whoppers and the astounding frequency of Trump's lying, for example, Trump's average of "21 erroneous claims a day" during his first term.

As is apparent in the excerpts above, the lying is just part of the problem, and mutually reinforces a pattern of bad policy and whipsaw decision-making.

It is clear that Trump deserves to be called Dishonest Don, as Bolden suggests. It's too bad that's not the only problem -- or even the main one -- he poses as President.

-- CAV

Four Possibly Useful References

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. Is that sample of a tune from some episode of your favorite show driving you crazy because you can't place it? Find out what it is by consulting tunefind.

2. Wouldn't it be great if you had fresh herbs on hand every time you cooked? Sure, but don't make me laugh.

Failing that, you can find a handy fresh to dried herb conversion table at the Reluctant Gourmet. Also included are pointers on the relative merits of the fresh or dry version of an herb and when to add fresh vs dry.

3. Have you discovered to your consternation that you -- or someone you're trying to help with car trouble -- is missing the car's owner's manual?

Lemon (the "spiritual successor" to Charm) has you covered.

4. If wants to take proper care of laundry and strangely unable to read hieroglyphics both describe you, you might find this laundry care label guide helpful.

-- CAV

Asked and Answered (RE: Dr. Bhattacharya)

That was fast!

Just a few days ago, I commented favorably on an open letter to Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, penned by Derek Lowe:

Regardless of where I would eventually land in a thoughtful evaluation of a pre-Trump Jay Bhattacharya, I think Lowe would say that Bhattacharya will have committed career suicide by taking his current post, absent a fantastic answer to that question.

I did not expect to see agreement from Lowe and an answer to Lowe's question so soon, if ever, and yet we have both, in Lowe's latest post on "The Latest News in Vaccine Obstruction."

There, Lowe comments on the the federal government's prevention of the publication of several large-scale studies on the safety of the coronavirus and shingles vaccines. Here is the bit directly concerning Bhattacharya:

There is broad, sustained opposition to vaccine development and deployment in this administration, from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on down, and there has been a series of decisions that all point in that same direction. Squashing publication of studies that help to confirm vaccine safety is absolutely on brand. The Times article mentions several instances of this, with a recent example being the cancellation by Jay Bhattacharya at CDC of a publication on the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines. (Howdy, Dr. B! Feel like taking a crack at answering the question I posed to you the other day?) Meanwhile, officials like Vinay Prasad, recently departed from the FDA and thank God, feel perfectly free to make statements about deaths from vaccines that they utterly refuse to back up with any data at all. It's a scandal - a crime - and under any sort of normal circumstances careers would be ending over it. But here we are. [formatting and links in original]

Regarding these studies, it is worth repeating what Lowe had to say:

These results are (1) expected and (2) still very good to see. And this is exactly the sort of work that should be done as newer vaccines are rolled out, because although clinical trials are extensive, nothing is as extensive as millions of patients out there in the real world. Reviewing safety on that scale is obviously good practice, and obviously money and effort well spent. But it turns out the the FDA has blocked publication of all of these studies, even though two of the coronavirus ones had already been accepted at a journal. [bold added]

Or, as I once quipped after hearing some MAHA nut's incredible assertion about vaccine deaths: Where are all the dead bodies, then?

This is a breathtaking failure at the highest level. Certainly, the government shouldn't be meddling in science at all, but at least until this administration, it had experts who meant well in charge. We cannot say the same any long.

At least I'm done wondering whether Bhattacharya is a good guy or not, so I guess there is that.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected effectiveness to read safety in a sentence.

Jones Act Waiver Yields Rich Data

Cato's Scott Lincicome considers economic data from Trump's wartime waiver of the century-plus-old protectionist disaster known as the Jones Act.

In just over two months, economists like himself have harvested a trove of information about what happens when the government doesn't dictate who builds, operates, and owns a ship that operates between two American ports:

[T]he waiver reveals some of the domestic shipping demand that the Jones Act has suppressed, thus hinting at the law's substantial economic costs. As industry publication TradeWinds reports, foreign vessels utilizing the waiver have supplemented a fully-booked Jones Act fleet instead of displacing it. This implies the existence of latent demand for coastwise shipping that the law has thwarted -- additional transactions between U.S. companies and U.S. ports that would occur daily but for the Jones Act's costs. In non-waiver times, this activity goes to foreign suppliers, along overland U.S. routes, or via ridiculous workarounds such as sending Gulf Coast fuel to the Bahamas for blending before delivering it to California. For the next few months, it doesn't.

The waiver data also show the potential for both U.S. long- and short-haul shipping markets -- sometimes between a single American company's U.S. facilities. Distant voyages include diesel from Louisiana to Puerto Rico (due to "non-Availability of U.S. flag vessels"); crude oil from Texas to Pennsylvania; gasoline from Houston to Long Beach; and renewable diesel from New Orleans to Portland. Jones Act critics have long claimed that the law forces supply-constrained U.S. areas to use imports instead of preferable American-made goods; under the waiver, Phillips 66 is shipping domestic oil from Texas to an East Coast refiner, instead of the foreign crude it usually sends.

The short-haul voyages are just as noteworthy. They include gasoline and diesel from Washington to California and Oregon; same-state shipments of fertilizer, ethanol, and refined products in Louisiana, Texas, and California. These are natural trade lanes that have been blocked for decades, all but ensuring more traffic on U.S. interstates and rail lines instead of goods traveling more efficiently on the water. [bold added]

That's just data blowing the alleged economic case for the measure to smithereens. The national security case is likewise hollow.

Interestingly, Lincicome notes that, if anything, the impact of repeal would be even more positive since that would give investors and companies the certainty they'd need to plan and build in order to take advantage of the many opportunities currently being denied to them by the Jones Act.

-- CAV

A Pro-Vaccine Resource

After recently learning that infectious disease expert Amesh Adalja has a podcast, I listened to a few episodes while out yesterday. They're all short, but very interesting. One of these episodes, about Measles and the Avian Flu, mentioned a web site I'd never heard of before, Back to the Vax, which is run by two former anti-vaccine activists.

The site is devoted to promoting good health by fighting back against the anti-vaccine movement:

Heather Simpson is a former anti-vaxxer who dug deep into the science, and finally put her fears to rest. She is passionate about science communication as a way to overcome the most common vaccine fears. She has an 8 year old that inspires to create needle-less vaccines for all children. She is enrolled in school as a Biology major with a focus on Communications.

Lydia Greene was an anti-vaxxer for 12 years and wrote a story on her journey to changing her mind, and bringing her 3 children up to date. She is now in nursing school to get into public health, to deal with vaccine hesitancy on the front lines.

Together we share our story with anyone that will hear us. To our surprise, we have been welcomed back with open arms. We now give other people like us support and a platform to share their experience if they choose to.

Their stories and those of others appear on the site's blog. If I recall correctly, one of the founders bought the lie about vaccines causing autism -- only to learn that her unvaccinated son was autistic.

The site also features a 70-page booklet titled Vaccine Fears Overturned by Facts, which is a collaboration with the Immunize Kansas Coalition. I have not read the whole thing, but I am impressed by a few things I read that I already understood well-enough to evaluate, one example being its discussion of thimerosal, which reads in part:

Remember, "mercury" was removed from most childhood vaccines over twenty years ago! So how many vaccines still contain mercury? While none actually contain "mercury," multi-dose flu vaccine vials do contain thimerosal, a preservative that contains an ethylmercury group.

...

Yes, thimerosal is used as a preservative in multi-dose influenza vaccines, however it is also used in cosmetics, tattoo inks, eye drops and contact lens solutions, disinfectants, as well as in products used to treat contact dermatitis.

Methylmercury is the type of mercury found in fish. It can be toxic to humans at high exposure levels. This is why the FDA recommends limiting your intake of some types of fish.

Compounds containing ethylmercury, on the other hand, are cleared from your body faster than methylmercury and don't appear to be toxic. For example, methylmercury takes around 20-80 days to be cleared by half from the body, whereas thimerosal takes around 7 days to be cleared by half from the body...

Each section is listed in an annotated Table of Contents and includes a QR code by which anyone can go to the list of references for that section, an innovation that shortens the booklet, so that it doesn't seem like an inaccessible tome that nobody ever is going to have the time to trudge through.

I recommend perusing the booklet, because, while it is aimed at the vaccine-hesitant, it is also a handy catalogue of the myths driving the anti-vaccination movement, as well as refutations of the same.

The site's inclusion of the stories of recovering anti-vaxxers is good for a couple of reasons I can think of: (1) it helps the questioning anti-vaxxer feel seen, rather than preached to, and (2) it helps humanize anti-vaxxers to those of us who have never been anti-vaxxers and might be puzzled or even smug about them.

The first will motivate anti-vaxxers to help themselves, and the second will help the rest of us understand where they came from, and reach out to them more sympathetically and effectively.

With our Federal Government platforming a very evil person in Bobby Kennedy, Jr., we need efforts like this to fight back, and it is encouraging to see that this is indeed being done, and being done well.

-- CAV